The Dead Past (2 page)

It didn't seem as though he waited for anyone in particular, laid back and enjoying his meal, but I knew he was there for me. He didn't read the paper unless he was killing time: the front page of the gazette read MERLIN'S TURKEY TAKES COUNTY PRIZE. Nobody read the paper unless they were killing time. I stepped over and put my suitcase down, sat beside him and waved the waitress over.

"You know what I said to myself not more than twenty minutes ago?" he asked.

 
"What was that?”

“I said, 'It's been a long while since I've seen Johnny Kendrick, I wonder how he's doing?' And then I stop in here for breakfast and up you come walking right under my nose."

He still looked the same as when we'd played varsity football together almost ten years ago. Most of his face was eclipsed by a large, boyish smile that used to turn cheerleaders into lemmings that would follow him off any cliff. He had slightly suspicious eyes too bright to be considered beady, yet he occasionally dropped into an Eastwood squint that would set any
wisemouth
back a few paces. His first year on the force, I'd seen him break up a pool room brawl by dislocating every third guy's arm. He earned his respect the old-fashioned way. If Lowell and I weren't exactly best friends, I was certainly glad we weren't enemies.

"It happens like that sometimes," I said.

He redoubled his attack on his breakfast and was finished before the waitress came with my coffee. "Come on," he said. "I'll drive you into town."

We walked to his squad car parked directly out front, and I noticed the cab that Anna had sent for me. I paid the driver for his time and let him go, then got in beside Lowell, overly aware of the shotgun locked vertically between the seats. "Is this standard issue now?"

"The Grove's changed some." He frowned. "You'll never believe it, but I've started repeating things my father used to tell me. I'm not sure how I feel about that."

"For example?"

"Well, get this, I caught myself the other day saying ‘when I was a boy we always slept with our windows open.' " He grimaced, and it surprised me at just how much of his father I did see in him at that moment. "In exactly the same disgusted tone my old man always used."

I frowned too because, like him, I couldn't remember if we'd actually done that or if it was just something our parents had told us too often. "I think I know what you mean."

"I've also been quoting prices a lot whenever I go shopping. It all makes me sound cheap and bitter, and I'm neither."

"If there's one person I don't consider a cynic, Lowell, it's you."

We crept down the highway through the snowy lanes; traffic was negligible, but even taking the weather into account he drove especially slow. It was as if he was giving a stranger a grand tour of the township, a proud papa showing off his baby. Canadian winds blew off Lake Ontario across northern New York, freezing everything; when he turned off the highway we entered a new world carved out by the blizzard. Canopy trees cocooned in frost, utility wires and poles heavy with rime, and six-foot-high waves of white unfurled across the drainage ditches as we continued down into Felicity Grove. Cars were cluttered into driveways, making room for the plows. The evergreens and pines added an emerald hue to the frost on the windshields.

There was silence in the car except for the occasional crackle of static and indecipherable murmurs over the police radio. Since the official investigation into Richie
Harraday's
murder was still under way, anything Lowell told me would be off the record. If Merlin's turkey could make the headline then word of murder was going to have them cleaning their rifles. Rather than push for information, I let Lowell broach the subject first. It wasn't a long wait.

"This one confuses the hell out of me," he said. "And the more I mull it over the more scattered the implications become."

"How so?"

"I can't see why anyone would want to kill Richie
Harraday
. He was strictly a nickel and dime operator. He had no money or drugs to steal."

Living in the city had taught me many things, and one of them was that nobody needed a reason to kill you. Out here it was still different, I hoped. "Maybe it was something personal. Was he chasing the wrong guy's wife?"

Lowell's lips flattened, and his shoulders rose like hilltops as he shrugged. "Not that we know of. I kept a pretty close eye on him since his last arrest, and he seemed to have kept to the narrow. Frankly, I never thought he'd have the guts to burgle a house." His squint returned. "And then he goes and gets himself killed off a couple days later. Over what? Where's the connection?" He grunted, harsh and low, the way Anubis did. "And the possibility exists that there is no connection. That we're just dealing with some
sicko
and a random killing."

"Do you believe that?"

"No, but it's something I've got to think about."

My next question was the rough one. "Do you think Anna was deliberately involved?"

"I don't know about that either, and I'd hate to hazard a guess. It doesn't make much sense one way or the other."

I agreed with him. My grandmother's house did not lie at the end of Little Red Riding Hood's path through the woods, but it was a corner home set almost directly across the back woods of a park, where the brush overgrew into thickets. Neighbors on either side were more than fifty yards away down the ends of the block. I'd never thought about how secluded a place it actually was. Conceivably,
Harraday's
corpse was simply dumped there because it was a conveniently remote area. But why leave him in the trash can where he was sure to be found? Why not hide the body in the woods where it might not be discovered for days, maybe weeks?

I didn't want to think that somebody had chosen Anna for a particular reason.

"How did he die?" I asked.

Lowell checked his watch. "Haven't gotten the coroner's report yet, but Wallace should be done in a little while, around noon.
Harraday's
neck was broken though, that much is certain, but it might have occurred when the killer or killers were jamming him head first into your granny's pail."

"What a lovely thought. No other signs of struggle? Footprints in the snow?"

"The way it was coming down last night anything would have been covered in a matter of minutes."

Icicles gleamed from low hanging branches and dropped onto the hood of the car as we passed. "Where was he for the past three days between the time he brought the jewelry to the pawnshop until they found his body?"

"Nobody's saying for certain, but he was probably right at home. We watched the house as best we could, but he lived out in a trailer by the edge of town, and there are plenty of logging paths back there."

"He live alone?"

"No, with his brother Maurice."

"Get out of here," I said.

Lowell chuckled. "I heard his mother named him after Chevalier, which probably explains why he's got such a nasty disposition. Everybody calls him Tons. He's about thirty-five, a troublemaker but not clever enough to be a real problem. Sold a little cocaine and stole some farm equipment for a few years, but then he got married last spring and had a baby girl. That seemed to get him turned around and settled down. You can never be completely sure, though."

"Did he ever change his name?"

"No."

We crossed in front of the county courts where a large gazebo and cast-iron fountain embellish the town square. "You know why I picked you up, don't you?" he asked. "And why I'm not going to go into my usual lecture about how you should hold your granny back and let the cops handle the investigation?"

"Yes." He was nervous, too. "Was there a note?”

“If there was, it wouldn't be made public knowledge."

I needed to ascertain if a note had been left behind for my grandmother, and now I knew there hadn't been or else Lowell would've found a way to tell me. We pulled up in front of Anna's house, and I got my first look at the place where Richie
Harraday's
body had been disposed of. The snow was trampled by the police and a hole with a ten foot circumference had been dug in the search for physical evidence.

"Anything at all?"

"No. Tell Anna I'll be stopping in on her from time to time. If you need me, just holler."

"You really say that, don't you, Lowell? You say, ‘holler' not ‘give me a call.' You say holler."

"I say holler. So did my father. So did you.”

“I don't think so. Thanks for the lift."

My grandmother's house wasn't at the end of a path through the woods, but there was still a bad wolf or two around. Lowell and I might not have slept with our windows open as children, and those homespun tales our fathers told us about childhoods free from fear could have been merely gingerbread spicing. Maybe there had never been any real safety in Felicity Grove.

I was glad he had the shotgun. If I had to, I'd holler like a banshee owl.

I walked up the shoveled path and the front door opened, storm window swinging back against the wood railing with a crash as Anna wheeled herself onto the porch to greet me. Anubis never strayed from her side, gazing over the yard like he was lord of the manor.

Once again I was taken by how much they occasionally acted as parts of the same being, the Rottweiler's muscle and ferocity tied in an odd fashion to my grandmother's cool depth of intelligence and character. Six years together had taught them to move as one, the dog's paws never getting caught beneath the tires of her wheelchair, and Anna rarely having to move her hand more than a few inches to pat Anubis' head. Even the similarity of their names seemed a symbiosis of some kind.

At sixty-eight, Anna Kendrick was as lovely as any woman twenty years her junior. She had that handsome, womanly quality that lasts long after nubile waifs have lost their giggly, lip-nibbling charm. In the three decades since her husband had died, my grandmother had been offered more marriage proposals than the entire ladies' auxiliary rotary club.

As an adolescent, her hair had been the sharply yellow color of whey, and then in her teenage years it had changed to a premature, full and beautiful silver. Since that time, it had never turned white or gray. My grandmother showed few signs of age; her face was nearly free of wrinkles, except for the deepened crow's feet tracks about her eyes and those thicker parentheses around the mouth. Her lips were the true definition of pert, though if I ever said that out loud she'd probably deck me. Despite the wheelchair, there was nothing feeble about her. Strength radiated. Her vision remained twenty-twenty, and biceps bulged beneath her wool sweaters. People mistakenly assumed she'd crocheted the sweaters, but knitting had actually been my mother's love. Anna had been bestowed boxes of cardigans and pullovers.

"Jonathan," she said. "You're looking well. Thank you for coming on such short notice."

She made it sound like we were meeting for a sales committee. I was dumbstruck for a moment, the conversation with Lowell weighing in my thoughts. "Are you all right, Anna?"

"Of course, dear, why do you ask?"

Anubis trotted down the ramp beside the porch stairs and gave my hand a couple of swipes of his broad tongue—that action alone made him about four hundred times more friendly to me than he would ever be with anybody else besides my grandmother—before he turned and stalked away.

"You must be famished," Anna said. "I've been preparing much of the morning. Let's have a late breakfast." She glanced at the icy ground. "Please be careful of the ramp. The boys who shoveled didn't put down as much salt as they should have."

Once inside she kissed my cheek, and I took her hand and pushed the chair to the head of the dining room table. Settings and dishes had been laid out, and I could see she'd spent all morning on one of her usual extravagant feasts. She liked to cook and always went overboard. More food was in view than four people could eat, unless maybe Lowell was invited for brunch. I dropped my bags, took off my coat and draped it on the old-fashioned rack in the corner.